The Key Commandments That Lead to Ph.D. Failure

There are certain mistakes, or we may call them as blunders that would make sure your failure in your PhD journey. Staying away from these big mistakes is important and you can do that if you know about them in advance so that you can follow a more proactive perspective.

Not choosing your supervisor carefully: A lot of students, when deciding to work on a doctoral programme only focus on choosing a good university or institution and topic. They aren’t aware that the supervisor is equally important or rather more important. Having a bad supervisor can mar the quality of your work or even maybe come in the way of success of your course.

Being overconfident about yourself: Not seeing yourself as a beginner when you venture into a Ph.D. course is a certain way towards failure. Even if you may have excelled academically in all your previous education, embarking onto a Ph.D. course is all together a different journey and asks for a different type of skill set because it is the pinnacle of education system and you must know that in the professional academic world, you are a beginner and needs you to pick up some altogether new skills.

Delaying starting to work: With all the apprehension that is associated with doing a Ph.D., a lot of researchers want to be proactive and do a lot of homework before actually getting on to doing research themselves. They may spend a lot of time reading or planning their research activities so as to ensure they make the least mistakes when trying to execute it. However, that may not be best the approach as how much ever preparation that you do, eventually you are bound to do mistakes as the practical experience of research cannot be without failures but the more you delay starting the work, higher are your chances of failure.

Leaving all the analysis for the end: That is another approach that can lead you down the path of Ph.D. failure. If you would leave all of it to do in one go in the end, you would have to do it on huge big data and that also under big time constraints. Without any prior practice and hands-on experience of such tricky analysis, there are chances that you may succumb to the pressure it may create for you.

If you aren’t decisive on time: Often during course of Ph.D. studies, you will be expected to make decisions and you may not know what the best decision to take is. However, if you delay taking decision because of confusion of lack of support, you wouldn’t reach anywhere. Whether your decision be right or wrong, you got to take it to reach measurable benchmarks.